The present invention relates to systems for displaying text and graphics and particularly to systems for displaying text on television displays.
Systems have been developed for displaying computer or internet type information on conventional television monitors. For example, the WordGate service provided by WorldGate Communications, Inc. of Trevose, Pa. allows the display of Worldwide Web pages on a television monitor. Such a system is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,999,970 issued to Krisbergh, et al. and U.S. Pat. No. 5,961,603 issued to Kunkel, et al., the disclosures of which are hereby incorporated by reference herein in their entireties.
The formats used for displaying graphics and text on computer monitors are not always optimal for other types of display systems. Many display systems, such as televisions built to display information encoded in NTSC and PAL formats, differ from computer monitors in that they cause certain combinations of colors to be more difficult to read than other combinations. For example, green text on a purple background may be difficult to read. These systems may also cause text having colors and brightness levels similar to those of the background to be difficult to read.
This difficulty in reading displayed text can be particularly troublesome in systems that display Internet information on a television, because information which was originally intended to be displayed on a computer monitor is being displayed on a television.
Thus, a need exists for a display system providing improved readability of text when the text is difficult to read.
The invention is a method, system and computer readable medium for processing display data comprising text and a background. A combination of the text and background is evaluated against one or more objective criteria to provide one or more objective values. A determination is made whether one or more of the objective values is beyond one or more respective thresholds that are indicative of text-background combinations that are difficult to read. One of the group consisting of the text and the background is adjusted if the one or more objective values are beyond any of the one or more thresholds, so that the objective values are within the one or more thresholds after the adjusting.